LACMA's Transcendental Painting Exhibition Reveals a Well-Kept Secret of Modern Art

By Jake Erlewine

The ongoing exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-1945 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the latest in a string of shows to examine the transnational reach of theosophy on early modern art and is the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the work of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), a collection of ten artists active in New Mexico during the New Deal. 

Agnes Pelton, Departure, 1952. Oil on canvas, 24×18 in. Collection of Mike Stoller and Corky Hale Stoller. Photograph by Paul Salveson.

According to a canonical history of art, it could be easily posited that American artists by and large did not carry the torch of the avant-garde until the onset of World War II, as the modern art trends exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show were rejected by painters in favor of the regionalist imagery of small-town America, exemplified by Grant Wood. The TPG sought to fill this perceived lack of forward, outward-looking American art by creating an environment for artistic production far outside the representational norm. Largely influenced by the teachings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the group’s manifesto states that their principal aim was to “carry the painting beyond the appearance of the physical…upon planes which are termed idealistic and spiritual.” When looking at works by members such as Agnes Pelton and Emil Bisttram, it is easy to see the same universal and esoteric qualities that pervade works by Kandinsky and af Klint. In one of Pelton’s later works, titled Departure (pictured above), a light and dark orb merge against the background of a characteristically Southwestern gradient. Forming the vesica piscis, representing the interface between the physical and spiritual planes, the eclipse seems so far removed from any worldly qualities, and projects in the simplest form possible a sort of primeval harmony. What separates the work of the TPG apart from their spiritual contemporaries is its accessibility - Pelton’s paintings seem not only to bridge the astral and physical, but the high and low in its quest to make spirituality through art accessible to all. 

It is important to note, however, that many of the artists’ styles were fully developed before the group’s formation in 1938; in other words, the Transcendentalists did not have a uniform aesthetic to bind them. This is evident when looking at the oeuvre of the TPG’s co-founder, Emil Bisttram. In paintings such as Oversoul (c.1941), the artists prioritises use of symmetry and rhythm above all else, as colours are portrayed in states of fusion and separation, as square and rectangular forms give way to circles, suggesting the spirit’s ascension out of the physical and machine realm. Having been exhibited previously in Maurice Tuchman’s landmark exhibition at LACMA The Spiritual in Art, the exhibition of Transcendental Painting Group artists seems to come full circle by challenging the curator’s claim that the “genesis and development of abstract art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas current in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” This is a wonderfully American brand of abstract art, and it serves as both a foil to the formulaic readings of art history posed by Barr and Greenberg, and as further proof of New Mexico’s status as a locus of immense spiritual and cultural innovation.

Emil Bisttram, ‘Oversoul’. C.1941. Oil on Masonite. Private collection, courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC. https://unframed.lacma.org/2022/12/18/week-lacma

The exhibition runs in Los Angeles until June 19th.

Bibliography

Boyd, Kealey “How a Group of Abstract Painters in New Mexico - and the U.S. Government - Changed Modern Art.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 16 Feb. 2023, 

Griffin, Jonathan. “The Artists Who Wanted to Rise above It All.” Apollo Magazine, 5 Apr. 2022, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/transcendental-painting-group-new-mexico/. 

Introvigne, Massimo. “‘Theosophical’ Artistic Networks in the Americas, 1920–1950.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 4 (2016): 33–56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26418547.

Knight, Christopher. “Review: Transcendental Painting Group Is One of Modern Art's Best Kept Secrets. This LACMA Show Proves It.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 6 Jan. 2023, 

Smith, Roberta. “'Agnes of the Desert' Joins Modernism's Pantheon.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2020,